Some video at site
Earlier thread:Mountain Lion Trapped in Downtown Santa Cruz Aqueduct
Posted on 05/16/2013 5:41:12 PM PDT by nickcarraway
A young male mountain lion tranquilized and rescued after it was trapped for hours in an aqueduct near downtown Santa Cruz is being released into the wild today, a state Department of Fish and Wildlife spokeswoman said.
The cat was first seen around 7 a.m. Later in the morning, it became trapped in the Branciforte Creek aqueduct near Water Street and May Avenue, police said.
Wildlife rescue crews from the University of California at Santa Cruz Puma Project were able to tranquilize the animal and it was transported to the Marine Wildlife Veterinary Care and Research Center.
Staff from Moss Landing-based WildLife Emergency Services provided equipment for the rescue, including netting to block escape routes at the creek after they were alerted about the situation by Santa Cruz authorities around 8 a.m., group president Rebecca Dmytryk said.
A veterinarian from the Department of Fish and Wildlife was also at the scene, Mackey said.
A staff member from WildLife Emergency Services helped the veterinarian and police personnel move the tranquilized animal into a crate, Dmytryk said.
“We were all working for the good of the animal as well as the safety of the people,” Dmytryk said.
The mountain lion weighs about 100 pounds and is healthy and in “very good condition,” Mackey said.
Dmytryk said the young mountain lion was likely a few years old. The mountain lion was taken to the center around 1 p.m. and was set for released later Thursday—after the effects of the tranquilizer wore off—into an undisclosed area of the Santa Cruz Mountains, Mackey said.
No one was injured during the hours-long rescue effort, police said
I have no info on where to go if you want to adopt him...
Good to hear.
Dangerous, but beautiful animal.
So, wonder what did it cost for all of these necessary helpers?
They can kill all of the Great Whites they want, but I’m glad they spared this cat.
I think he's going to have to be a catch and release. In Far-Far-Away. Austin works for me. Near the capitol.
/johnny
In CA. Surprised no one tried to mount it when it was down. /s
Santa Cruz ping
Oh brother...
If I mount a mountain lion that means my taxidermist made a boat payment and my lawyer's son is still in Harvard. And I have something dead to put on top of the piano to scare everlivincrapoutta my housecatz.
In California.... It could involve marriage.
/johnny
I was thinking in the Capitol building during an EPA funding debate.
I think glyptol was talking about catrimony...
Like this?
Surprised they didn’t give the cat two ear-rings....and a MoonBeam Tattoo!!
Yup, just what I figured, a yearling male chased out of his home turf and looking for food.
A small lizard woudn't do it. A stuffed big cat... that freaks them out.
We live sorta harsh around here. They were with me when I did the mountain man thing. And the catz did the 'hunting chuckle' thing catz do when a 2000 lb bull wandered up onto the front porch. Took me a minute to clear my eyes and figure out it wasn't a mouse or a blue jay.
I bring parts of large dead critters into the house weekly. They expect that from me.
One of their own? Not so cool.
/johnny
Big deal. I’ve seen them in my backyard a mere 20 miles from
Beautiful downtown hartford Connecticut. Extremely dangerous.
You've just earned richly what you are about to get for that.
I'd not be at all surprised if you thought my neighborhood 'up in the mountains' was a great location for the release. After all, I'm bent over weeding for six months a year, so I probably wouldn't even notice it, until... So nice of your type to use our property to make yourselves feel better about having taken up so much prime land for your urban lifestyle.
About a year ago, my neighbor up the road had a 150# kittie casing his property. Seems kittie had a thing about hopping his eight foot fence and marking the ground outside his two-year-old's bedroom window. Pooped in a planter pot on his patio too. Yeah, it was a nice place to let your kid go out and play... before four urban counties passed Prop 192 over the objections of everybody else.
The kitties were here first? Oh really? No more so than where you live. My property was being used as a transit corridor for the Spanish Franciscans for fifty years before there even was a Los Gatos. I promise you: by 1880 there wasn't a cat for fifteen miles from here. Even as late as 1935, there was a town up here with a hundred cabins, a train station and a post office. The depression and State Highway 17 killed it.
If you want to BUY sufficient property that kittie can roam, go for it, but I hate to tell you that almost all of that is already taken and occupied. That's why kittie came to town in the first place, that and the fact that this has been such a dry spring there's very little water at higher elevations.
If the public wants large predators, they should be accountable for their habitat and well being. Instead, "our" agents at Fish and Game will put any landowner who chooses to defend his family or his animals under an inquisition costing as much as a college education.
NONE of this policy is good for mountain lions. In fact, the State is killing more cats than were ever allotted under legal hunting. Besides the fact that we now pay bureaucrats to do the hunting when hunters used to pay for the privilege, the only difference to the animals is that the cat has to be sufficiently stressed as to move into human abodes and cause a severe threat to life and or loss of property before DFG will issue a depredation permit (it's now DFW, but few will recognize it as such). Worse insofar as habitat is concerned that produces food for the prey these creatures eat (you know, the base of the food chain), what we have now is over-predation, which is causing the loss of herbivores that eat the vegetation that has become severely overgrown because "the public" won't let us burn it periodically as it has been for thousands of years. That means no forbs, which are the feedstock for the entire system. Native annual forbs are going extinct for lack of disturbance and succession run amok.
That's a very destructive sentiment you have there to the very animals you claim to care about.
He’s be a nice addition to the White House if he wasn’t left unfed for a few days before arrival.
You've just given me an idea for a children's book.
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